To mark the publication of The Complete Gary Lutz, a monumental collection of stories by a renowned minimalist, Germán Sierra takes the pulse of Lutz’s aesthetic project in a new review at Full Stop.
In a review of three new academic texts at the Sydney Review of Books, Michael Bérubé sketches out a guide to reading literature through the lens of “autism aesthetics”.
In a review of Zadie Smith’s new story collection, Grand Union, for 3AM Magazine, Andrew Hungate finds himself struggling to isolate the virtues of the book.
At Berfrois, Ed Simon assesses the recent public responses to the death of Harold Bloom and ends up taking aim at everyone, sparing neither Bloom’s admirers nor his detractors.
In a long, searching essay at the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith makes the case against “cultural appropriation” by interrogating the language in which it is discussed.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Natasha Boyd praises Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School for its mastery of language and its mastery of the flow of time.
At Full Stop, Houman Barekat reads Jonathan Gibbs’ The Large Door as a knowing throwback to a kind of novel swept away by postmodernism.
Writing in The Baffler, Nathan Goldman admires the ambition but questions the achievements of Ben Lerner’s forthcoming novel, The Topeka School…
One of the most thoroughly considered responses to Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag comes from Robert Minto in a new essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
At The Millions, Seth L. Riley considers the stylistic aims of László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (trans. Ottilie Mulzet), the final volume in the author’s quartet of dark visions of Hungarian rural life.